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If
you have been fallowing my blog and read my last post it stated that I
would have Release 2 of my xGameConsoleXNA library up and posted within
a week. Well a week has come and gone. 2 weeks, ... 3 Weeks, 4 Weeks,
... What can I say. When a person sleeps when there tired and not when
social doctrine declares when it is time, the days seem to blend into
one another and time passes. 4 whole weeks. Hmm, seems like only
yesterday that I made my last post.

Anyway it has been a busy
few weeks. The house has been sold and we need to be out by mid July,
so we have been packing and getting ready to move. And I am destined to
be home less for the next few months until the mushroom season starts
up again in late august. Which means my computer use and internet
connection will be severely limited for some time.

I have also
started working on a new project with my brother these last two weeks.
I don't want to say too much about it because it's not finished but
suffice it to say I have written some apps that have crawled over 1.2
million page links in just a few days, and out of those 625000+ are
blog related. We are thinking about creating a service and doing a
search engine designed for a select group of people, that will offer
much more detailed info that a standard Google search can. My brother
seems to think we could make up to $20,000 a month each if we can get
it working and it really starts to take off. It would also be the first
project I have worked on whose end result is intended to put some money
in my pocket. For someone who can live comfortably on less then $4800 a
year, $20,000 a month seems like millions. But until that happens it is
a wait and see game.

And lest you think I have forgotten about the xGameConsoleXNA library, check out the xGameConsoleXNA page for the link to the Release 2 download as well as some how to articles. Better late then never!

I have gone back and finally done some more work on my xGameConsoleXNA library for the XNA platform. The next release will be Release 2 and will mainly contain updates to how the user interacts with the console.

It can now do things like scroll through the text that was written out to the console

Pressing the left and right arrow keys on the keyboard you can set the insertion point for typing text

If
you type a really long line of text in the entry line that is too long
to fit within the console the text will now gracefully scroll left or
right depending on where the insertion point is

More comments in the code as well as xml 'summery' comments for the methods

Made a number of optomizations so some parts of the code are more simplified

There
are some breaking changes such as some properties have been renamed to
better more understandable names. I also moved a few methods and
properties out of the console class and into the ConsoleComponent class
because they really were more suited being in the ConsoleComponent
class.

I also added a WordWrap property to the ConsoleComponent
class so that text that gets written to the console will now wrap to
the next line if it does not fit.

I should hopefully
upload Release 2 within the next week. I would also like to mention
that I noticed some of the xGameConsoleXNA code may not be 360
compatible, even though I cannot test it on the 360 because I do not
have a creators club subscription. For example the LoadAlias command
was using the IO.File.ReadAllLines method and the 360 xna api's do not
contain the ReadAllLines method. I will try to keep an eye out for more
code like that. I modified the code so that it no longer uses the
ReadAllLines method but I will not be able to ensure that
xGameConsoleXNA will seamlessly run on the 360 until I get a creators
club subscription.

It is my intention to eventually get the
xGameConsoleXNA working on the 360 but I promised myself that I would
only purchase a creators club subscription after I had completed or had
come close to completed a working game. So yeah, being more of a tool
developer it might take me a while to get a subscription. :(